COMPETITION Live events sector The almighty spat between O2 owner and promoter AEG, artist Ozzy Osbourne and AEG’s rival Live Nation, which also includes the joint venture between manager Irving Azoff and Madison Square Gardens (MSG) has gone legal, with Ozzy accusing AEG of anti-competitive behaviour. The case revolves around the reported requirement set by that AEG that links bookings at venues it operates in London an...

HEALTH AND SAFETY Live events sector Illinois lawmakers have proposed an interesting new solution to the risk of a mass shooting similar to the one that happened in Las Vegas last year. The new proposal for large-scale events would allow drones to be used to supervise events. This would include music festivals, state fairs, and concerts and events held in arenas or stadiums. During a Senate debate, Senator Martin Sand...

CONTRACT Recorded music, broadcasting US independent label Glassnote Records has brought a legal action against their former artist Childish Gambino – aka Donald Glover – in a dispute over what should happen to royalties that are earned by his recordings which are paid to the US collecting society SoundExchange. Glover released three albums with Glassnote between 2011 and 2017, before announcing earlier this year that...

PRIVACY Broadcasting Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sir Cliff Richard has won his privacy battle with the BBC and has won a substantial damages payment from the state broadcaster. You will probably remember that this litigation spewed from the BBC’s coverage of South Yorkshire Police’s (SYP) raid on Sir Cliff’s Berkshire home in 2014. The raid was the result of a claim against Sir Cliff for historical sexual abuse. Whilst the ...

COPYRIGHT All areas European MEPs who voted on the Copyright Directive in Strasbourg today have failed (by a small majority) to move the legislative process forwards whereby the European Union Council, Commission and Parliament could have negotiated a final text for passage into law. The vote was close, with 278 in favour, 318 against and 31 abstentions. The outcome rejects the earlier Legal Committee decision to approve the draf...

COMPETITION Musical instruments and technology The world-famous guitar maker Fender and four leading keyboard manufacturers are at the centre of a price fixing investigation after “dawn raids” were carried out at their British offices by staff from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Although the companies have not been officially named, The Sunday Telegraph named the four companies as Yamaha, one of the biggest musical...

COMPETITION / CRIMINAL Live events sector World Cup organisers FIFA have filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland against the ticket website Viagogo as part of a crackdown on unauthorised World Cup sales, the latest in a line of legal challenges to the company’s business practices. Last week, a UK government minister urged consumers to boycott Viagogo as National Trading Standards launched an investigation into allegations th...

CONTRACT Live events sector The disastrous Fyre Festival, organised by entrepreneur Billy MacFarland, is one example of what happens when technology innovators believe the myth that it’s easy to organise a successful music festival. It’s not. The festival, held in April 2017, experienced a number of serious management, administration and organisational issues and was cancelled after guests had begun to arrive in the B...

HEALTH & SAFETY Live events sector Venues and theatres have warned that new EU legislation will see their ‘lights going out’ after new legislation is introduced which will not provide any exemption for stage lighting and will make specialist lighting subject to the same environmental rules that govern lighting sold domestic and office use. The Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris, has estimated...

HEALTH & SAFETY Live events sector Chris Goldscheider, a former Royal Opera House viola player has won a landmark High Court judgment after he suffered a life-changing hearing injury at a rehearsal of Wagner’s Die Walkure in 2012. The claim came from a rehearsal on the 1st September 2012, Mr Goldscheider was seated directly in front of the 18 strong brass section of the orchestra for a rehearsal in the orchestra pit a...

COPYRIGHT / CONTRACT Music publishing. Collection societies Country music songwriter Shane McAnally is taking one of the USA’s big two collecting societies, ASCAP, to arbitration in a dispute over $1.3 million of “premium payments” that he says should have been paid for his top performing songs. Having left ASCAP for the new rights organisation, Global Music Rights, McAnally’s works were still administere...

COPYRIGHT / COMPETITION Music publishing, collection societies The head of American collecting society BMI has written an opinion piece for Billboard hailing what he says is a victory in the log running 100% licensing dispute as a deadline is passed with no appeal from the Department of Justice who had fought the USA’s four music collection societies, by BMI, ASCAP, GMR and SESAC, challenging the convention that anyone...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing, collection societies The South African Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa has noted “with grave concern” the article published in City Press and News 24 Online News platforms on 1st April 2018 into what is “alleged to be the biggest music rights scam in South African history involving the legendary and multi-platinum selling gospel artist Hlengiwe Mhlaba. The report goes into w...

COPYRIGHT Merchandising The dispute and controversy surrounding Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s line of musically themed T-shirts is drawing to a close. The Jenner line boasted a plethora of major rick star names, including Notorious BIG, KISS, Ozzy Osbourne and Tupac Shakur to name a few, but it seems the Jenner’s didn’t ask for any permissions. Indeed most of the people featured on the T-shirts were not happy at all, a...

TRADE MARK Artistes Commodores Entertainment Corp, the corporate body behind the current incarnation of The Commodores, has asked a court in Florida to consider sanctioning a founder member of the group, Thomas McClary, as part of a long-running trademark dispute citing McClary’s continued use of Commodores Trade Marks despite a court order that should prevent him from doing this. The band formed in 1968 when two other ...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing Former N-Dubz member and X-Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos has reportedly won a 10% share of the songwriting income from the Britney Spears and will.i.am track ‘Scream & Shout’ after a six year dispute over who should share the royalties from the hit song. Contostavlos argued that she had collaborated on an original version of the song ( then called I Don’t Give A F**k)...

COMPETITION Live events sector COMPETITION: The promoters of an Oregon music festival have filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Coachella Music Festival and its organizers, alleging that Coachella’s parent company uses its market clout to unfairly restricts artists from performing at other festivals. The suit, filed in Portland’s United State District Court on Monday, was brought by Soul’d Out Productions, LLC, and names...

COPYRIGHT Recorded music, film and TV U.S. District Court Judge Edgardo Ramos has made a monumental decision in favor of members of The National Music Publishers’ Association (incl. Sony/ATV & EMI Music Publishing, Warner/Chappell, ABKCO, peermusic, Spirit Music and Imagem Music). Judge Ramos ruled that the owners of Wofgang’s – a collection of thousands of live concert performances such as those of legendary Rock and...

COPYRIGHT All sectors The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has introduced the Music Modernization Act with the goal of encouraging innovation and rewarding creativity in this increasingly digital age. Some of the antiquated law surrounding copyright in the U.S. is considerably flawed, and after years of reviewing the system under the leadership of Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte the new legislation incorporates elements of four pr...

CONSUMER / COMPETITION Live events sector The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has indicated that it will take action against Viagogo, the online secondary ticketing site. CMA announced last year that it has secondary ticketing sites in is sights. That was last year, and this week the CMA has stated that a number of secondary ticketing sites, namely StubHub, GetMeIn! and Seatwave had updated their policies to ensure...

CONSUMER/COMPETITION Live events sector Viagogo has been fined one million Euros by the Italian competition (antitrust) agency, AGCM, for failling to comply with instructions issued by the agency in April 2017. At the time, Viagogo and three other resale sites were fined a collective €700,000 for failing to provide complete ticket information to consumers According to Pollstar, AGCM found that Viagogo misled customers by not...

COMPETITION Live events sector SABAM’s unilateral move to raise live music concert tariffs in Belgium last year has been ruled to constitute unfair commercial practices by a Brussels court A coalition of Belgian festival and concert promoters filed a lawsuit against Sabam (Société d’Auteurs Belge/Belgische Auteurs Maatschappij), Belgium’s performance rights organisation, last May after tariffs were increased across th...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld the 2015 jury verdict which found that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ 2013 hit ‘Blurred Lines’ infringed on the copyright in Marvin Gaye’s 1977 song ‘Got To Give It Up’. The decision had attracted widespread criticism and comment, not least as many commentators felt that the jury made their decision by comp...

COPYRIGHT / COMPETITION Music publishing, collection societies The head of American collecting society BMI has written an opinion piece for Billboard hailing what he says is a victory in the log running 100% licensing dispute as a deadline is passed with no appeal from the Department of Justice who had fought the USA’s four music collection societies, by BMI, ASCAP, GMR and SESAC, challenging the convention that anyone wis...

COPYRIGHT / CONTRACT Music publishing, collection societies Country music songwriter Shane McAnally is taking one of the USA’s big two collecting societies, ASCAP, to arbitration in a dispute over $1.3 million of “premium payments” that he says should have been paid for his top performing songs. Having left ASCAP for the new rights organisation, Global Music Rights, McAnally’s works were still administere...

HEALTH & SAFETY Live events sector Chris Goldscheider, a former Royal Opera House viola player has won a landmark High Court judgment after he suffered a life-changing hearing injury at a rehearsal of Wagner’s Die Walkure in 2012. The claim came from a rehearsal on the 1st September 2012, Mr Goldscheider was seated directly in front of the 18 strong brass section of the orchestra for a rehearsal in the orchestra pit a...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing Miley Cyrus is facing a lawsuit from the Jamaican dancehall star Flourgon (Michael May) which has been described in the popular press as a $300 million claim for copyright infringement which focuses on the lyrics single Cyrus’s 2013 hit single ‘We Can’t Stop’. In Flourgon’s ‘We Run Things’ the lyric reads ‘We run things, things no run we’. The similarity between the lyrics is...

CONSUMER / COMPETITION Live events sector The UK’s four main secondary ticketing agencies have been banned from using certain “misleading” price strategies. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said they had not been clear enough about extra fees added at the end of the booking. The four largest sites are Get Me In, Viagogo, StubHub and Seatwave. The action, comes after widespread concern from consumers,...

COPYRIGHT Collection societies PRS For Music and PPL have officially launched a new joint venture company which will provide one licence to cover all public performance rights. The new company will administer the joint licence – called TheMusicLicence which will allow users to play recorded music publicly in venues including bars, offices, gyms, fishmongers and music venues. The licence will cover users for the performi...

CONTRACT Live events sector Rapper Kanye West has settled his battle against Lloyd’s of London, which began when insurers refused to pay out West’s claim stemming from the cancellation of several dates on his 2016 Saint Pablo tour. The Stour ran from August to November. West performed 41 shows in 87 days before the stoppage. In all, 22 dates were cancelled. West has not ventured back on the road since those cancelled...

CONSUMER / COMPETITION Live events sector The UK’s Consumer Minister Andrew Griffiths has announced the implementation of a number of new rules to regulate the online secondary ticketing marketplace, although readers of this blog will note that some of these are already law, coming into force after amendments were made to the 2015 Consumer Rights Act by MPs Sharon Hodgson and Mike Weatherley. That Act also in...

CONSUMER / COMPETITION Live events sector Following on from the introduction of tough anti-touting laws in the state of New South Wales last year, Australia’s federal government is considering a nationwide ban on the re-sale of tickets in some circumstances. According to Australia’s Daily Telegraph, the country’s government is considering five possible options to legislate in the market for the resal...

EQUALITY All sectors, recorded music, live, music publishing Two legislators in Tennessee, Representative Brenda Gilmore and Senator Jeff Yarbro, have submitted a new bill addressing sexual harassment in the music business. The pair have co-authored proposed state legislation HB 1984/SB 2130, which seeks to address the fact that independent contractors in Tennessee (including many people working in the music busine...

COPYRIGHT Sound recordings, audio-visual, music publishing One of the striking features of French copyright law is the protection it affords to authors in their contractual dealings with would-be licensees and assignees. One of the key statutory provisions that contributes to this high level of protection is Section L.131-2 of the Intellectual Property Code (IPC), which until recently provided as follows: “Contracts ...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing The copyright lawsuit filed against Taylor Swift claiming the lyrics to her 2014 track ‘Shake It Off’ infringed on a 2001 hit by American girl group 3lw has been dismissed by the federal court of California. The plaintiffs, songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, of the 3lw track ‘Playas Gon’ Play’ claimed there were similarities between the lyrics that infringed their copyrigh...

CRIMINAL LAW Artistes Police say 44 people were arrested while filming on a Manhattan roof top on what seems to be a new video for rapper China Mac, who had appealed for members of the public to attend the shoot. It seems that Mac’s public appeal drew in a fair crowd, and eventually the police say they responded to numerous calls of disorderly conduct in the early evening 37 men and 7 women were arrested and charged with crimin...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing The streaming royalty rate for songwriters in the USA has jumped 44%. The Copyright Royalty Board has confirmed that compulsory royalty rates in the US market will rise by just under 44% for songwriters over the next five years. The National Music Publishers Association, who lobbied for the improvement, called the ruling a “huge win for music creators”. The streaming companies w...

COPYRIGHT All sectors: audio-visual, sound recordings, music publishing An open letter, addressed to the European Parliament has asked MEPs to back an effort to reform the safe harbour laws and implement legislation to narrow the so called ‘value gap’. Not much new there? Well, the letter had two prominent signatories: the godfather of electronic music, Jean-Michel Jarre, and the Grammy Award winning Angelique Kidjo.&...

COPYRIGHT Recorded music, music publishing, internet A US appellate court has reversed a $25 million verdict against the US Internet Service Provider Cox Communications in what might be seen as a defeat for record label BMG, which had sought to hold Cox liable for copyright infringement for its subscribers who were sharing pirated files online. But looking at the judgment, and despite what looks like a set back for BMG Rights Man...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing In September 2017, the lawsuit between music publishers The Richmond Organisation-Ludlow Music Inc (TRO-Ludlow) and the We Shall Overcome Foundation (WSOF) and Butler Films LLC saw US District Judge Denise Cote’s ruling that placed the first and fifth verse of the time-honoured iconic protest song We Shall Overcome firmly in the publicdomain. A hearing was scheduled for March 2018...

COPYRIGHT Music publishers, broadcasting Songwriters and music publishers in America have welcomed an appeal court that has dismissed the Department of Justice move to introduce “100% licensing”, confirming the current system that the so called “fractional licensing” system for co-written songs with different publishers (and sometimes multiple collection societies with a ‘fraction’ of the song)...

COPYRIGHT Recorded music, music publishing In October 2016, New Zealand’s High Court ruled that the National Party had infringed on singer Eminem’s copyright in Lose Yourself and awarded the rapper’s publisher NZ$600,000 (£315,000) in damages, saying that the political party’s use of a track titled ‘Eminem Esque‘ that was “sufficiently similar” to Eminem’s original song was infringem...

COPYRIGHT Music publishing Two US Congressmen have launched a proposed new statute that has the support of both music owners and music users in an effort to overhaul of the mechanical royalties system in the US. Doug Collins and Hakeem Jeffries say that the Music Modernization Act would “bring music licensing its first meaningful update in almost 20 years”. With no collecting society offering a bla...

COMPETITION / CONSUMER Live events sector The UK Government has unveiled new legislation aimed at preventing ticket touts from using so called ‘bots’ to bulk buy tickets. The new measure will be a new criminal offence contained in the Digital Economy Act, and touts who use automated software to harvest tickets to sell on at inflated prices, in effect circumventing limits on maximum ticket purchases set by ev...

COPYRIGHT Recorded music, music publishing For perhaps the first time this year it appears there may, or may not, be a Blurred Lines effect case on the horizons. Lana Del Rey recently tweeted: “it’s true about the lawsuit. Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by ‘Creep’, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing. I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only a...

TRADE MARK Live events sector Feld Entertainment, the owner of circus company Ringling Bros, has forced Kid Rock and promoter Live Nation to change the name of a tour. It’s all over an alleged trademark infringement with the Kid Rock tour due to start on the 19th January and billed as the Greatest Show on Earth tour. Feld claims the tour, dilutes and infringes on its “famous trademark”, ‘The Greatest Sh...

PLANNING Live events sector On the back of a private members bill which almost certainly failed to have reached the statute books, the UK government has agreed is to write the “agent-of-change” principle into planning law, in an announcement welcomed as a “seismic victory” for music venues by UK Music chief executuve Michael Dugher. Its a major triumph for the live sector and Secretary of State for Communitie...

PLANNING / LICENSING Live events sector Artists and music industry leaders joined politicians in Westminster to support the ‘agent of change’ principle as John Spellar MP presented his bill to Parliament in a legislative move which if successful would change UK planning law so that property developers putting new residential buildings close to existing music venues would be responsible for identifying and resolving an...

COMPETITION Live events sector Live Nation has announced that it had come to a settlement agreement with Complete Entertainment Resources Group, Inc in the ‘Songkick’ saga. The Songkick owners have accepted a settlement before the case was due in court on the 24th of this month in what had looked like a fascinating case, and a ‘warts and all’ exploration of the live giant’s business ...

COPYRIGHT Internet, recorded music, music publishing YouTube is to begin issuing International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) numbers to creators. The platform has become a registration agency which means it will now start requesting and issuing ISNI codes from and to any creators who publish content, including musicians and songwriters in a move which should help with attribution and royalty payments. ISNI ...